The fatal flaw of most desktop publishing programs is that they slavishly try to mimic the manual procedures for putting together a newspaper or whatever that date from the days when production was constrained by the exigencies of Linotype machines and hot metal – yet are touted as enabling one individual to write, edit, lay out and run off an entire publication: in fact, where the entire production process is in one pair of hands, what is really required is a system that enables copywriting, editing and layout to be performed simultaneously so that an item can be written into a hole on the page on the fly, and that is what Springboard Software Inc of Minneapolis claims to have come up with in its Springboard Publisher for the Apple Computer Macintosh – it is claimed to integrates page layout, word processing and graphics creation in one program; it still sounds a bit constrained, but a unique typing window provides rapid text entry without waiting for page reformatting and text can also be imported from word processors such as MacWrite and Microsoft Word; it’s out next month in the US and is $200.
